Yakuza Studio Boss "Committed" to PlayStation

Yakuza creator, Toshihiro Nagoshi, has pledged his allegiance to the PlayStation brand, while also suggesting that consoles are on the way out.

In a candid interview with CVG, Nagoshi hypothesised that the market for home consoles will diminish, as portables become gamers’ main platform of choice.

He said:

Consoles – PS3, PS4, Xbox 360-2 – the market for those will get smaller, and the main market will become portable games.

I don’t think consoles will disappear, but more and more people will use home PCs for gaming, and a long time in the future it will just be PCs and mobile phones, and eventually mobiles will become just as powerful as games consoles.

For now though, Nagoshi is very much a PlayStation loyalist. He continued:

At the very least I am committed to Yakuza remaining a game for Sony hardware. I feel like we grew up together.

When we were deciding which platform was right [for the first Yakuza game], it was PlayStation 2. I wanted it to be on the number one platform, so I didn’t think twice before approaching Sony.

Amazingly, Sony turned the game down:

The truth is, at first they turned it down. For the market at the time, they thought it was too niche; they were worried it wouldn’t sell, and I got a quite disappointing reply from them.

But I kept pestering them, and eventually they gave it a closer look. That’s because they saw the passion I had for the game, rather than anything to do with whether or not it would sell. So I’m very grateful. In as much as they were putting their faith in Yakuza, they were putting their faith in me.

The Yakuza franchise is set to continue next month, when the spin-off title, Yakuza: Dead Souls, shuffles into Western stores. Nagoshi’s latest game, Binary Domain, releases in Europe today and North America next week.

He's obviously speaking with a Japanese perspective, where handhelds outsell their console counterparts almost every week. It's a hard perspective for the west to get its head around - portable gaming might become the standard in Japan, but it won't be in the west for a long time.